He Said, She Said, They Said

In the intense summer heat the news cycles are being dominated by political fisticuffs. Don't these folks ever go on vacation?

Anyway, the mainstream media and, perhaps more importantly, the social media are abuzz with the latest invective in the D.C. domestic dispute between POTUS and certain members of Congress. The four Congresswomen, henceforth known as The Squad as they call themselves, currently battling President Trump are Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) and Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.).

The Squad members are the sworn enemies of Donald Trump and this week, things escalated rather badly. POTUS recently tweeted of these women, three of whom were born in the U.S., that if they don't like the country they should just "go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came." Then last night at a North Carolina rally when Trump mentioned Ilhan Omar, the crowd burst into a chorus of "Send her back!" which the president did nothing to discourage. To be sure, it was unstatesmanlike, immature and he deliberately fueled the toxic racist sectors of American society. As bad as the comments were, they would be easier to deal with if all this was just a one-off. Sadly, there's another side.

While the mainstream and social media are excoriating Trump, just this week Omar introduced a resolution in the House that would support an anti-Israel and anti-Semitic movement known as BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions), a movement that has ties to the Palestinian terrorist group, Hamas. By the way, just last week Fathi Hammad, a senior Hamas spokesman, called for the death of Jews around the world. Oddly, the mainstream media isn't reporting this side of the story. By comparison, Omar's latest efforts and her past statements are far more caustic than Trump's, so why isn't she being called racist as well? Shame on the media for their obvious bias and selectivity.

The Squad is causing a rift within the Democratic Party and the Speaker of the House and top Democrat, Nancy Pelosi, isn't happy with her freshman Reps. And neither are other Democrats. For the Democrats to win back the White House they have to be the party of reason and that means sober and moderate governance. Unworkable policies like AOC's Green New Deal, Omar's anti-Semitic remarks and support for BDS and Tlaib's "Let's impeach that motherf-er" aren't exactly helping the cause.

There are no saints in this dust up, only sinners. Birds of a feather and all that. I feel sorry for the American voters who elect people to lead them and then get stuck with a bunch of clowns who try to create the agenda and hold the country back.

Nothing is Ordinary

"I doubt whether anything is in fact ordinary except in our own mistrusting nature." 

                                                                              George MacDonald from The Curate's Awakening (pp. 104-105).

The life of Jesus was an extraordinary one mainly because someone so ordinary looking did such extraordinary things. In fact, His life was a scandal. There was His virgin birth. His earthly father, Joseph, was shocked and scandalized at Mary’s pregnancy during their betrothal. Jesus’ station in life was scandalous – born in a stable with a livestock manger for a bed. And He was from Nazareth. When Phillip told Nathanael that he found the one about whom Moses and the prophets wrote, Jesus of Nazareth, Nathanael asked, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” This Nazarene peasant told the religious glitterati of the day that He was the great “I Am”, claiming to be the one true God. How dare this man profane the name of God by lowering Him to the level of our existence? They were scandalized because Jesus looked so ordinary.

Yet He was no ordinary man. He healed the sick, gave sight to the blind, caused the deaf to hear, cast out demons, walked on water, miraculously multiplied food, raised the dead and a whole lot more. And when the people saw all these things they were amazed. They said, “Is this not the carpenter’s son? Is not his mother Mary and his brothers James and Joseph and Simon and Judas? And don’t we know his sisters? Where then did this man get all these things? And they took offense at him” (Matt. 13:55-57).

How can such an ordinary man – one of us – do all these miracles and preach all these controversial messages? Even His mother and brothers came looking for Him because they thought He was losing it. Mark 3:20-21, “Then he went home and the crowd gathered again so that they could not even eat. And when his family heard it they went out to seize him for they were saying ‘He is out of his mind’.”

But can you blame His family for wondering about Him? Have you ever asked yourself how you might’ve reacted if you were Jesus’ mother? What would you say if your friends came to you and said, “You need to speak to your son. He’s been doing some wild things like healing people’s diseases and teaching strange things. Oh, and He just told a bunch of respected religious leaders that they were going to hell.” Wouldn’t you be exasperated by the crowd around your home that was so disruptive you couldn’t even eat? Who could blame her for thinking back to the night of the angel’s visitation and wondering, “Surely, this isn’t how things were supposed to go.” Would you have ever guessed that this could be God’s way of doing things? It’s just too common, too local, too…people-like and controversial; the ordinary clashing with the extraordinary.

Well, let’s consider this. If God is so big as to create all of this, why couldn’t He become part of it for a season? If it’s His creation, He can do whatever He wants with it – even join it in lowly fashion. If we believe that God is love as the Bible says, and that He loves us in particular, how can He love us if He is not in relationship with us? What is any relationship if it isn’t local, or personal and in the flesh? We don’t go around loving spirits, high-falutin concepts or grandiose philosophical ideas. Though we may greatly appreciate them, we don’t get into loving relationships with them.

So when you think about it, this particular modus operandi of God isn’t so crazy. In fact, God truly loving the human race isn’t possible any other way. In order to demonstrate His love for us, He had to become one of us or else we would never really know His love and we would never be able to respond in kind. The idea of God loving people the same as two people loving each other – only much better - is completely foreign to the other religions in the world whose adherents are also scandalized by it.

In ordinary looking Jesus, God demonstrated the value He places on human life and how we have the capacity to relate and commune with the One who created the cosmos. One of Jesus' disciples asked a question that was ahead of its time, "Judas (not Iscariot, but the other disciple with that name) said to him, 'Lord, why are you going to reveal yourself only to us and not the world at large?'" (John 14:22). One day He will reveal Himself to the world at large but only those who love the truth will recognize Him in His veil of ordinariness. And those who recognize Him know there is nothing at all ordinary about Him or anything else He has made.